Toward Brave New World

Cover of Brave New World's 1st edition

Just as a utopia is a literary work that describes a perfect society, from the point of view of its author, a dystopia is the description of a society where certain characteristics of the world in which the author lives, which he considers unacceptable, are exaggerated and carried to the extreme, with a satirical or denouncing intent.

The two world wars caused a feeling of disillusionment in the West that gave rise to the two most famous dystopias of recent history: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (written in 1931, published in 1932) and Nineteen-Eighty-Four by George Orwell (written in 1948, published in 1949). These two works are original in another sense: while other earlier dystopias (such as Samuel Butler's Erewhon, 1872) were located in remote places, such as the Antipodes, the two modern dystopias take place in the future.

The feeling of oppression that seizes the reader of these two novels is almost unbearable. In both cases, the very few nonconformists in society are excluded: in the first, they are banished to an island; in the second, the exclusion is only temporary: the rebel is submitted to brainwashing so as to destroy his spirit and turn him into a mental waste, raw material on which the social planner can act, remodel and educate until he is recovered and adapted to society. The two dystopias are horrible, but they have a very great power of conviction and verisimilitude.

Pending problems in the standard cosmological model

The standard cosmological model, prevailing since 1998, is called LCDM and is based on the following statements:

• The universe began with a Big Bang, after which there was a phase of accelerated expansion (inflation), which then declined to levels close to the current ones. Ordinary matter appeared later, formed essentially by hydrogen and helium.
• The average curvature of the cosmos is close to zero (flat universe): three-dimensional space is approximately Euclidean.
• The average density of matter in the cosmos is equivalent to about 30% of the critical density (which separates an open, unlimited expanding cosmos from a closed cosmos that would contract again). Since the ordinary density of matter detected so far represents less than 5% of critical density, the remainder (over 25%) must be an unknown form (dark matter). In fact, it would be what is called cold dark matter, which explains the initials CDM in the name of the model. I talked about dark matter in an earlier post.

Automatic translation

John McCarthy

In a famous summer course that took place at Dartmouth College in 1956, the term artificial intelligence was applied for the first time to all those computer programs that perform tasks traditionally considered exclusively human, such as playing chess and translating from one human language to another. Those attending the course, led by John McCarthy, felt optimistic enough to predict that in ten years those two problems would have been completely solved. Thus, they hoped that by 1966 there would be programs capable of defeating the world chess champion, and others that would translate perfectly between any two human languages.

In March 1961, my uncle, Felipe F. Moreno, then chief of Spanish translators at the headquarters of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, wrote in the ITU magazine an article on machine translation and how it could affect human translators, which proves that the question was hot. Shortly afterwards, when the deadline announced by the artificial intelligence forerunners had been reached, with both problems far from being solved, it was obvious that they had been overly optimistic.

We know that the goal of writing a program that would defeat the world chess champion was met in 1997, when Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the champion in that year. The other problem, machine translation, was even more difficult. At the end of the sixties the following anecdote was well-known in the computer-programming world:

The origin of violence

Pitirim Sorokin

On the question of violence and evil in society there are three fundamental theories:

1. Every human being is a battlefield between good and evil and carries with him strong tendencies towards evil and violence. It is necessary to educate him in moral values, ​​to teach him to control his impulses.
2. Man is good by nature, society makes him bad. Education must try to keep us as much as possible in our original natural state, the good savage. This is the theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
3. Man is good by nature, everything bad is a consequence of a poorly focused education. The solution is education in the gender ideology, which is dominant today.

What does science say (in this case, Sociology)?

One of the most important sociologists of the 20th century, the Russian-American Pitirim Sorokin, wrote the following in his book Society, Culture and Personality (Chapter VI, Factors of Solidarity and Antagonism):

Futurology

In an earlier post I mentioned that many of scientific news published today are not really new discoveries, but future previsions. What I did was analyze a specific issue of the magazine Science News, and found that just three news, out of 18 it contained, corresponded to concrete findings.

At the suggestion of one of my readers I made a more meaningful analysis, by reviewing, not just a single magazine, but 40, of four different years, to see if the effect stays constant or changes with time. The results were as follows:

Year	Nr. of articles	% Futurology
1990	176	32
1995	162	33
2001	177	47
2006	167	40
2008	161	48

Catastrophes and catastrophism

Chernobyl disaster

From time to time catastrophes occur, usually unforeseen, sometimes causing tremendous damage. Let's look at some relatively recent ones:

• July 28, 1976: Tangshan Earthquake (China), intensity 7.5 on the Richter scale. The official death toll was 249,419, though some say it was actually three times as big.
• December 3, 1984: Bhopal disaster, a leakage of methyl isocyanate from a pesticide factory that caused some 20,000 deaths and affected about 600,000 people.
• 26 April 1986: Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Disaster, which caused 31 direct casualties. It is estimated that the number of deferred deaths due to the effects of radiation could approach 80,000, although the estimates may not be reliable.

Permanent economic growth is unsustainable

2009 World Economic Forum Meeting

Politicians and economists often tell us that job creation requires a GNP growth above 2 or 3%. According to them, the optimum situation and the end of the crisis will be reached when a permanent growth is achieved above these figures, the higher the better. Not many seem to be considering whether such a situation is possible in the long run.

Let us take the simplest case: assume that it were possible to achieve a cumulative annual growth of 3% GNP, indefinitely continued. Would we have achieved utopia, would we be living in the best of worlds?

Maybe, but not for long.